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Good Things Do Happen in Public Education
There are some good teachers who are doing good things in the public school system. I know this is hard to believe, but it is true. While many institutions have lost the core mission to simply educate students, not every person in a position of authority in front of children has some weird agenda that will end up on Libs of TikTok. Perhaps there is even a silent majority of teachers who simply want to teach well?
Now I understand the pessimism you might feel when living in what one might call “interesting times.” I have personally been forced to stop academic instruction at a public high school for half of my class as all of my kids were forced to participate in an LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Parade, whatever their beliefs about such matters. I have personally listened to administrators discuss highly charged political issues over the intercom in a public school as if everyone subject to those voices from on high has experienced some “trauma du jour” in the exact same way. I have been yelled at on a college campus for simply pointing out media bias against conservatives and called a “racist” at a faculty meeting while defending voters who might be Republican. I have had to sit through DEI training for educators in which stressing “racial essentialism” was considered “correct practice.” I was once proud to take a summer class in Boston until I realized the elite professors “teaching” me believed in using Herbert Marcuse’s framework for “repressive tolerance.”
Yet this is not the whole story.
Outside of my professional life, I tutor a student in middle school because I believe strongly in community service. I have nothing at all to do with setting the curriculum at this middle school. I am not a middle school teacher. In this scenario, I am simply an instrument of support who can help answer one kid’s questions about homework. We normally discuss the things that interest a 12-year-old kid, along with the need for punctuation.
Yet I’m sure you can imagine my delight when this kid’s homework last week dealt with the Cultural Revolution. This student is reading a book decrying the horrors of the Mao regime and totalitarian systems.
In a moment when Ivy League campuses are full of Hamas apologists yelling out slogans about genocide that they either don’t understand or really mean–terrifying in either case–this little middle school where I volunteer part-time is teaching young Americans about how the Red Guard was once an instrument of terror in the not so distant past. The student with whom I work is learning to think through why identifying people per some group can be a very dangerous thing.
And that was just the student’s English homework.
In Social Studies, the teacher is unfolding a unit on earlier Chinese history, which broadens understanding of the “olds” that the Red Guard was once intent on destroying.
I don’t know if the kid I’m helping has teachers who are willfully coordinating their lesson plans or not, but I can tell you as a teacher myself that what I see is great scaffolding about a topic in human history that seems pertinent to know in today’s world.
I’ll say it again.
There are some good teachers who are doing good things in the public school system.
And that is encouraging.
Published in Education
Yes, this is why it’s lazy and counterproductive to say the whole system is no good and needs to be replaced. It’s sad when conservatives advocate Red Guard-like solutions to governmental or educational abuses. Those people are probably just venting, but still, it uses up valuable mental energy that could be spent in better ways.
No -we who object are not just venting. When a school has lost 30% of its students (from 240 to 175) in 6 years to homeschool or private school, not due to decline in school age population, (after having been in the State’s top 5% in standardized scores) and the administration will not address parents’ and taxpayers’ questions about concurrent changes in curriculum and management, it’s not lazy or counterproductive to seek major change. I reject the characterization as seeking Red-Guard solutions. There is however a very real lack of mental energy or seriousness in our local school board, as evidenced by unwillingness to consider any reform or modification of District policy or direction.
All sorts of major changes are possible that are not red-guard solutions. If there are specific reforms that have been proposed, they are probably not red-guard solutions.
Some of the homeschool families that we’ve known have done great. Others, not so much. The public schools here are good.
We do not need to be–and should never become–like Mao’s Red Guard, but it’s completely legitimate to push hard for substantive reform in schools. I can completely understand why parents want a ton more accountability and real school choice from the public system for which they pay. There is a lot of real rot in the institutions that we ignore at our peril.
That said, this post is meant to be a word of encouragement. There are absolutely a lot of teachers who are on the side of parents per simply wanting to give kids a good education in their particular subjects.
My personal primary focus as an educator is to show my students the tools they need to think for themselves, even if I don’t always like what they ultimately think. (I’m not in the business of creating worldviews, but if one wants to analyze Maoism, one needs to know about the millions of dead on which that ideology is built).
So though I’ve learned in some ways to detest this word per how it’s been co-opted and turned into a political construct, teachers and parents can be good allies in the fight to get back to teaching while moving away from indoctrinating young minds.
As I said- I reject that characterization.
You reject what characterization? Please be specific. Lack of specificity is the kind of problem I’m talking about.
We sent my son to Catholic elementary school and continuing with Catholic high school. I think most of the teachers in public school are fine. Depending on the neighborhood you can get a good education. Remember I live in NYC, so it is neighborhood dependent. There are two issues that drive me to send my son to Catholic schools. (1) I can’t trust the small and dissolute group of students you might find in public schools. I went to public schools. They are there and through luck I avoided (for the most part but not entirely) getting hooked with a criminal or degenerate crowd. (2) The cultural values promoted at public schools can be loathsome. They preach this crap outside of parent’s purview, and yes there is an element of cultural proselytizing going on. Most teachers overwhelmingly vote left and for the most part are culturally to the left of their local community.
Personally, and probably most here would agree, the monopoly of the public school system needs to be destroyed.
And the librarians at all levels appear to be to the left of the teachers. The old stereotype of hair done up in a tight bun has been replaced by blue buzzcuts and obligatory pronouns.
I haven’t stepped into a library in a long time. Probably so.
I think it’s hard to always tell if a K-12 teacher is on the left or the right. Blue hair is an indicator though!!! The more progressive a teacher is, the more they tend to fly that flag. You just have to pay close attention.
Personally, I think you’re betting better (very good) odds if you guess your kids’ college professors aren’t conservatives.
Though there are a quiet few (when not tenured) and some older folk who sometimes are on Ricochet podcasts. ;)
There are some good teachers still in the system, but they are retiring and being replaced by the drones being pumped out of the schools of Education. Given the nature of those programs I cannot see anyone with a fully formed brain ever lasting in those programs, or surviving with their intellect intact, assuming one existed at the start. I was fortunate in having completed my college and grad schools before getting any preparation to teach in the public schools. The classes I had to take to fulfill my license requirements were pretty mediocre even back in the 60s and 70s. They got a lot worse in the following years. What I saw coming out of the University of Washington School of Education was teachers and administrators completely indoctrinated into a leftist agenda. Where that was most obvious was during the manditory training sessions held in our buildings. You could watch them and see their eyes focused on the trainers in hypnotic stares, and their head nodding in agreement with the absurd propaganda they were being fed. Those of us from an earlier age had a hard time not resorting to barf bags or the almost uncontrollable urges to walk out.
There is no one trained any longer to teach subject matter that isn’t thoroughly tainted with leftist BS. What is happening south of here in Oregon is a simple admission that they cannot fulfill their basic duty of teaching children to read or do math calculations. Those who do graduate with basic skills undoubtedly got them at home before starting school, but they are still largely contaminated with the leftist propaganda their teachers are best able to pass along. It is a grim picture, but one I am more and more accepting as reality.
Even many years ago, I don’t know a single one of my friends who lasted in education beyond their first few courses because they were so dumbed down and ideological.
In the mid 70s I knew politically liberal, hippie-adjacent college grads who would not go into K-12 education because of the certification requirements (then fairly new in Minnesota) for “sensitivity training.”
My daughter teaches in a charter school. The kids are from poor, but strict Latino families. She likes it; it’s hard-nosed, no-nonsense education. She must be pretty good; every year she’s gotten a job offer from the Beverly Hills school system and turns it down. The atmosphere is…very different there.
Doesn’t this seem like a cornball plot for a Disney Channel movie? “I tell you, I love these kids, and I don’t care about the money”.
Sensitivity training arrived in the early 1970s. I remember my first exposure to what would eventually become a pretty lucrative industry. In Seattle it began with The Human Relations Task Force. My school was chosen as one of the first to be subjected to their unique brand of garbage. The task force was comprised of a group which included a white man, Native American woman, Japanese man, black woman, Pacific Islander woman. There was an attempt to represent as many of various racial groups then present in Seattle. There may have been one or two others who I don’t remember. The two minority people who stood out were the African American woman and the Japanese man. I was struck by the latter largely because my knowledge of internment camps was pretty slim, having grown up on the east coast. The black woman stands out because what I saw that day was a forerunner of what would follow in the subsequent decades.
The particular woman proved to be, after the white group leader, the dominant figure essentially eclipsing all of the other minority representatives. She did so by pure will of personality, and an unwillingness to cede the platform to anyone else. The group created an animosity in our faculty towards each other that lasted for much of the next couple years. I managed to get myself excused from the proceedings after about week. (They went on for a full trimester, 60 days total.) I was able to do this because I was a special education teacher working with emotionally disturbed students. I went to my principal and told him that I had to spend 6 hours a day with emotionally disturbed children, and that I didn’t want to start it every morning with an hour spent with emotionally disturbed adults. He told me to simply stay in my classroom and not say anything to anyone about my absenting myself. However, what I saw of this early attempt to increase sensitivity between races in their results was appalling.
In subsequent years as this budding industry grew and became professionalized, unsurprisingly, there weren’t any groups represented other than blacks. They took over the industry and honed their product to razor sharpness. It was no longer about racial equality. It was about personal enrichment of the most talented performers.
Education degrees are looked down upon for a reason, but I know many teachers who are good teachers who survived education colleges because they realized what the game was, and they wanted to work with kids. It’s not that hard to survive stupid when you know it’s stupid.
Many teachers quit teaching with five years of starting their careers. It’s an astoundingly high number. But I think there are a lot of reasons for this. I tried to teach directly after earning my BA and left very quickly for other adventures. Then I returned to education when I was much older, more formed, and had already raised a family of my own. I understood teenagers more, and now I love this profession.
Unfortunately, you cannot escape DEI programs, whatever your profession now, though I also think they can be very counterproductive. The way people learn to trust each other is by simply working together and becoming friends, not by picking out visible differences.
I hope this too shall pass?
We need to name the bad teachers and remove them. They of course aren’t all bad.
We need to clean the curriculum.
We need to make the school policies through the consent of the parents, not by unaccountable and unpublished board fiat.
Most teachers want to serve the needs of the students. Some, though have an odd idea of what those needs are.
Best for this to be done locally, under the supervision of local taxpayers and parents. Some of them will make crappy decisions, but that’s better than even a good, uniform curriculum at the state or national level.